We were sitting around before dinner chit-chatting when one of the Sichuan teachers said he was getting a house with three storeys built. K was the same person who said on our first day in Sichuan that his goal for the near future was to get rich.

In reality, no one was much interested in what he was saying, but K was obviously intent on showing his fellow teachers what a smart money-manager he was and that he wasn’t anything like them — being paid very little as a rural teacher and, horror of horrors, being content with their lot.

He had a tea house, he told us. His wife was nominally the owner but he made sure that his bosses, the other teachers at the school and, most important of all, the parents of the students were aware that it was his tea house. The business was very successful, he said, and was bringing in profits several times what he was making as a teacher.

I asked why didn’t he just give up teaching and focus on his business since he seemed to enjoy entrepreneurship much more than the hard grind of teaching. “Oh no, “he said. “I would never do that. When I no longer teach their children, the parents will not have a reason to go to my tea house.”

If K was to be believed, then almost everyone at his school had some kind of money-making side line. S, a teacher from the same school whom we also knew, had a home renovation business which his wife was running. To keep it all in the family, S had his brother-in-law as the main contractor so that any profit, be it from selling the materials or providing the service, would go back to S. Apparently, in this day and age of rapid growth and land development, S had found the best business to be in. “He’s the one that I try to emulate,” K told us with pride. “Teaching will never make us rich. We’ve got to be doing something else.”

My only thought was “Why did I spend the day talking to them about being effective in the classroom when their hearts were not in it at all?” But then again, there, sitting right next to K was M, who had just told me that he was paid 1,200 yuan a month and that his main interest was writing. Earlier in the day, he had shown me a collection of his essays, stories and poetry that he had had printed and bound in a volume. It was his wish that one day he would be published author.

Somehow, while chatting with the group about why they chose teaching as their career, it came up that Qingbo was having a difficult time with his wife. The reason? He was making too little money and he was too busy to give her the attention she wanted.

Until the earthquake in 2008, teachers in rural Sichuan were making 500 yuan a month. Since the earthquake, they had been making between 1000 to 1500 yuan a month. That would be between 200 to 300 dollars.

It’s true that they get to live in dormitories in the school, but it also means that they are living in rooms right next to the students, which means they don’t really get time off. As long as there are students around, they are on supervision duty. On weekends, some teachers go home but many stay because their homes are just too far away. Many of them told me that they didn’t get a chance to go home until there was a long holiday. That makes going home something they can only do three or four times a school year.

I was astounded to learn that in the teachers’ rooms in the dormitory there was no running hot water. To get hot water, they have to take a basin and go downstairs to the communal hot water tap. They put the electronic debit card that the school issues to them to track their expenses at school on the meter and, like one of them put it, “Watch the money run out of my account as the hot water runs out of the tap.”

Traditionally, Chinese teachers have always been poor. The “disdain” for money is an indication of one’s integrity. But in this day and age, when teachers play a vital role in nurturing a whole new generation who will be movers and shakers of the country, if not of the world, surely they deserve to be paid and treated better so that there will continue to be quality people entering education.

Steve from Mianyang, the capital city of Sichuan province, told us that he was really impressed with the cleanliness of Hong Kong streets (!) as he had been there for a whole week and had not had to clean his shoes. He said when his cousin moved to England and wrote home to tell them that he had not cleaned his shoes for three months, no one would believe him. So, Steve’s experience in Hong Kong went some way to convincing him that the world outside Mianyang could be clean.